Dusklands
Ravan Press (Johannesburg), 1974
In the Heart of the Country Secker & Warburg, 1977
Waiting for the Barbarians Secker & Warburg, 1980
Life & Times of Michael K Secker & Warburg, 1983
A Land Apart: A South African Reader (editor with André Brink) Faber
and Faber, 1986
Foe
Secker & Warburg, 1986
White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa Yale University Press, 1988
Age of Iron
Secker & Warburg, 1990
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews Harvard University Press, 1992
The Master of Petersburg Secker & Warburg, 1994
Giving Offense: A Study of Literary Censorship University of Chicago Press,
1996
Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life Secker & Warburg, 1997
Disgrace
Secker & Warburg, 1999
The Lives of Animals Princeton University Press, 1999
Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999 Secker, 2001
Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II Secker & Warburg, 2002
Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons Secker & Warburg, 2003
Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands (translator)
Princeton University Press, 2004
Slow Man
Secker & Warburg, 2005
Diary of a Bad Year Secker & Warburg, 2007
1977
Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award (South Africa) In
the Heart of the Country
1980
Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award (South Africa) Waiting
for the Barbarians
1980
James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) Waiting
for the Barbarians
1981
Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Waiting for the
Barbarians
1983
Booker Prize for Fiction Life & Times of Michael K
1984
Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award (South Africa) Life
& Times of Michael K
1984
Prix Fémina Etranger (France) Life & Times of
Michael K
1987
Jerusalem Prize Foe
1990
Sunday Express Book of the Year Age of Iron
1995
Irish Times International Fiction Prize The Master of
Petersburg
1998
Lannan Literary Award (Fiction)
1999
Booker Prize for Fiction Disgrace
2000
Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) Disgrace
2003
Nobel Prize for Literature
2006
Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book)
(shortlist) Slow Man
2007
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist)
Slow Man
2008
Best of the Booker (shortlist) Disgrace
One
of a number of youthful, dissident literary voices speaking against the
apartheid regime in the 1970s and 1980s, Coetzee's distinctive prose was
identified early on as both eloquent/elusive and as politically
urgent. His work has been compared favourably with Nabokov, Kafka and
Conrad, and by the time of mature works such as Foe (1986) he had
already achieved international acclaim.
Much of Coetzee's writing reflects either directly or indirectly on recent
events unfolding within South African society, although critics have warned
against straightforward allegorical readings of his work. More productively we
might think of Coetzee's writing as questioning any easy correspondence between
fictional representation and the rapid, traumatic changes that have transformed
and continue to transform South Africa. As the narrative of his recent Man
Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999) demonstrates (with its
metafictional elements, its suspension in the present tense and its generation
of critical uncertainty) veracity is something Coetzee seeks to problematise
rather than produce. At the centre of Disgrace is 52-year-old David
Lurie:
'Once
a professor of modern languages, he has been, since Classics and Modern
Languages were closed down as part of the great rationalization, adjunct
professor of communications. Like all rationalized personnel, he is allowed to
offer one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrolment, because that
is good for morale. This year he is offering a course on the Romantic poets.
For the rest he teaches Communications 101, “Communication Skills,” and
Communications 201, “Advanced Communication Skills.” '
In
Lurie’s fall from Romantics Professor to Professor of Communications we witness
the wider reduction of art and language to the realm of the literal, the
functional, the practical. Within this new world academics have become, as
Lurie goes on to put it 'clerks in a post-religious age'. The curtailment of
creativity implied here is ironically captured in the transparent literalism of
the new courses Lurie teaches (e.g. communication skills), and in the numbers
used to label them (which imply rationalization and mechanical progress). The
literary critic Derek Attridge argues that moments such as these warn the
reader against reducing Disgrace to an instrumental political
function. That to do so is to ignore crucial sections of the text that are hard
to ‘read off’ as conventional messages or communication acts, such as the
puzzling role of dogs and animals in the novel, or David’s unfinished opera, or
the significance of the central (but absent) rape scene in the novel.
When
Lurie is disgraced by his university following an affair with a student, the
professor retreats to his daughter's isolated smallholding. The personal
differences between David and his daughter unfold against this backdrop as
tensions rise within the recently emancipated local community. Coetzee's
unforgiving vision of South Africa exposes the insecurities of a floundering,
but still dominant white culture.
Disgrace illuminates two of the key concerns of Coetzee's work: the
historical motivations behind colonialism and its legacies in the post-colonial
era. For Coetzee the post-colonial does not signal the formal disintegration of
empire, but rather a new, and in many respects more insidious phase of
colonisation. For example, his debut novel, Dusklands (1974) comprises
two novellas that evoke apparently discrete historical events, one colonial and
the other post-colonial, in a manner that clearly asks us to reflect upon their
relationship to one another and to contemporary South Africa more generally.
The first handles America's part in Vietnam. The second is set 200 years
earlier and focuses on a Boer settler in the 1700s. The very different
protagonists of these narratives: Eugene Dawn (an expert in psychological
warfare) and Coetzee (an adventurer and pioneer), turn out to be involved in
strikingly similar forms of oppression.
It is this kind of relationship between oppressor and oppressed in the second
part of Dusklands that also structures one of Coetzee's most powerful,
disturbing and successful works to date: Waiting for the Barbarians
(1980). The novel, which is on one level an exploration of the relationship
between barbarity and civilisation, takes its title from a poem by the Greek
poet Constantine Cavafy. Winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the
spare, razor sharp prose celebrated in Waiting for the Barbarians has
become a trademark of Coetzee's later fiction. Set in an unspecified frontier
land, a desert landscape at indeterminate point in time, the novel is an
allegorical exploration of the relationship between coloniser and colonised.
The Magistrate, who is in charge of the frontier settlement, finds himself caught
between the empire that employs him and the barbarians for whom he feels
increasing sympathy. Through the conflicted perspective of the Magistrate it
becomes apparent that the barbarians are not simply a population 'out there'
beyond the frontier occupied by the empire. The shocking, barbaric violence
that Colonel Joll deals out to an elderly barbarian and a young child in the
opening pages works to draw into question the very distinction between
civilised and savage. The barbarians, it would seem, lie at the heart of the
very empire that constructs them as other.
Waiting for the Barbarians was followed by the brilliant Booker Prize
winning Life & Times of Michael K (1983). The
allegorical abstractions of Coetzee's Barbarians are exchanged here for
a moving, intimate account of Michael K and his mother. The plight of these two
characters, both of whom are physically disabled, gets worse as they find
themselves without a secure home or income in a South Africa torn apart by
civil war. A dream of a better life in the country motivates their decision to
leave the city behind. Their tortuous journey out of Cape Town (Michael pushes
his mother in a wheelbarrow) offers little sign of liberation or escape.
Michael's mum dies, along with the dream they shared, long before they reach
the dreamed of destination. Like Disgrace, the novel evokes a rural
retreat, an idyllic setting that ultimately fails to materialise and resolve
the problems of the protagonist. (Escape, incidentally, is also the organising
theme of Coetzee's most recent novel, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002)).
These are often bleak uncompromising works of fiction in which resolutions tend
to replace solutions.
Coetzee's critically acclaimed novel Foe signals a temporary departure
from the South African landscape. A short, powerful book, it reinvents the
story of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe from within the city of London.
Re-imagining a canonical novel of British imperialism, it adopts and adapts a
distinct strategy within postcolonial fiction (including Jean Rhys' Wide
Sargasso Sea and Morag Gunn's Prospero's Child), as it writes
back to the culture of the coloniser. Foe is ultimately a tale about
tale telling: the female narrator, Susan Barton, tells her story in order to
find somebody who will publish it. Yet for all its richness and variety of
voice, Foe is most notably a novel about silence, the silence of Friday,
whose voice Coetzee refuses to represent. Through the silent centre of this text,
Coetzee manages to expose the extent to which language, too, is a key
instrument of colonisation. More recently, in work like The Master of
Petersburg (1994), Coetzee signals his indebtedness to other literary
figures and traditions notably the work of Dostoevsky and Crime and
Punishment. Coetzee's various influences can also be found within his
critical writing, of which Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999 (2001)
is an excellent recent example. Bringing together 29 essays, including pieces
on T. S. Eliot, Defoe, Turgenev, Kafka, Rushdie, Gordimer and Lessing (not to
mention an account of the 1995 Rugby World Cup) this collection is an important
companion volume to Coetzee's earlier collection, Doubling the Point:
Essays and Interviews (1992).
If Doubling
the Point and Stranger Shores help illuminate the
characteristically oblique fictional work of a notoriously reclusive and
uncommunicative writer, Coetzee’s ‘memoirs’, Boyhood (1997) and Youth
(2002), promise even greater insight. Nevertheless, Boyhood elects to
speak of the young Coetzee in the third person and its brief elliptical
narratives (‘scenes’, the subtitle tells us) serve to keep the reader at arm’s
length. Both Boyhood and Youth can be read either as novels
or memoirs and their combination of fiction and biography serves to frustrate
any authoritative understanding of the author’s formative years. Coetzee’s
genre-bending work continues in text like Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons
(2003), a book described in The Guardian as ‘non-non-fiction’, and by
David Lodge in The New York Review of Books as a work 'which begins
like a cross between a campus novel and a Platonic dialogue, segues into
introspective memoir and fanciful musing, and ends with a Kafkaesque bad dream
of the afterlife.' Some of the so-called ‘lessons’ of Elizabeth Costello
are in fact lectures Coetzee delivered at Princeton and published under the
heading The Lives of Animals in 1999.
Coetzee’s
next novel, Slow Man (2005), received mixed reviews. It concerns Paul Rayment,
a 60 year old Australian who loses a leg after being hit by a car. Paul is
cared for by a Croatian immigrant until he declares his love for her and she
flees. At this point (and this is the bit that disappointed some reviewers) the
reader discovers Paul is in fact a fictional character in the literary
imagination of Elizabeth Costello (the protagonist of Elizabeth Costello).
The metafictional narrative that follows, in which the text explores and
abandons various fictional possibilities for Paul, brings the reader closer
than either Boyhood or Youth to the creative dilemmas of
Coetzee the artist. If Coetzee encourages his readers to (mis)identify Costello
as Coetzee’s alter ego, his latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year (2007),
represents a more radical confusion of the boundary between character and
author. Its central figure is an ageing author who shares Coetzee’s initials,
has recently moved to Australia, and has even written some of the same books.
The book takes the form of a series of essays on real subjects, from terrorism
and Tony Blair to Tolstoy. But this is not a simply a collection of essays and
the books protagonist is not (quite) Coetzee. Since the publication of Disgrace
in the late 1990s, Coetzee has resisted writing straight works of fiction and
non-fiction, preferring instead to work across categories and genres in ways
that generate ontological and epistemological questions for his readers.
Dr James Procter, 2008
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth108
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© José Nicanor Liberos Mascarell
jolimas@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press